Features

The seventh annual Southern California Linux Expo, held February 20-22, included a wide variety of talks on open source projects, system administration, and software development from luminaries in the open source community. This year’s conference was larger than ever and included keynotes from Bradley Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, openSUSE's Community Manager. Kuhn talked about concerns with Software as a Service (a.k.a. the cloud), and Brockmeier discussed ways to improve the reach of an open source project.

By now, you might have noticed that I'm a big fan of Puppy Linux. It is the distro I'm running on my workhorse ASUS Eee PC 701 4G netbook, and it helps me to stay productive not only in airports, cafés, and hotel rooms but also at home. But if you are still undecided whether you should give Puppy Linux a try, here are five reasons why this little gem deserves a closer look.

Objects were not always a key part of the PHP project. In fact, they have been described as an afterthought by PHP’s designers. As afterthoughts go, this one has proved remarkably resilient. In this chapter, I introduce coverageof objects by summarizing the development of PHP’s object-oriented features.

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery will show you how to create realistic architectural models in Blender. Blender is an open-source 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, texturing, skinning, animating, and so on. It runs on all the important operating systems (including Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Installing any kind of operating system is a big move and can come as something of a shock to your PC. However, Fedora makes this complicated maneuver as easy as possible. Its installation routines are very advanced compared to previous versions of Linux, and even compared to other current distributions.